From Social Entrepreneurship to Impact Investing: The Art of Turning Antagonistic Assets into Complementarities

Professor Kai Hockerts Inaugural Lecture:
“From Social Entrepreneurship to Impact Investing: The Art of Turning Antagonistic Assets into Complementarities”

Abstract:
This second inaugural lecture marks the culmination of a five year Professorship “with Special Responsibility” (2013-2017). It reports on the progress made during the past five years and outlines future research challenges. The lecture will begin by describing competing definitions of social entrepreneurship and illustrating how these different perspectives lead to diverging organizational behaviour.

Adopting the viewpoint of social entrepreneurship as organizational behaviour explicitly aimed at the “creation of public goods through the generation of market disequilibria”, the lecture will analyse the different mechanism through which social entrepreneurship can turn what I call “antagonistic assets” into complementary assets. Next the lecture will summarize a series of articles analysing how intentions to engage in social entrepreneurship emerge and what effect education can have to encourage it. The talk will discuss the process of scale development and validation and the application of the scales in two different projects.

The lecture will close by showing how the work of the past five years forms the basis for future research into impact investing, arguing that future scholarship will have to answer the following questions: How can we measure the performance of both impact investing and social entrepreneurship? What are the most effective ways through which impact investors, policy makers and municipalities can help increase that performance? The lecture will stress the need for robust and rigorous longitudinal datasets that are able to measure the effect of different social entrepreneurial interventions.

About Professor Kai Hockerts:
Kai Hockerts is a Professor in Social Entrepreneurship at Copenhagen Business School (CBS). In his function as Academic Director of Responsible Management Education, he is also leading the CBS curriculum change initiative which reviewed all 19 bachelor study programmes with the goal of anchoring responsible management education across the curriculum.

Kai’s primary research focus is on corporate sustainability strategies and social entrepreneurship. Kai holds a Ph.D. in Management from the University of St. Gallen (CH). Before joining CBS, Kai was an Adjunct Professor in INSEAD (F). His research has been published in the Journal of Business Venturing, International Review of Entrepreneurship, Journal of Business Ethics and, Business, Strategy and the Environment.

Programme:

14:00 – Welcome by Head of Department Dorte Salskov-Iversen

             Introduction by Dean of Research Peter Møllgaard

14:15 – Inaugural Lecture by Professor Kai Hockerts

15:00 – Reception at MSC in Dalgas Have 15